


Afterwards

by Alasse_Irena



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Missing Scene, Post-The Dream Thieves, he's dead but he's there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-17 15:59:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10597377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alasse_Irena/pseuds/Alasse_Irena
Summary: Ronan goes to Kavinsky's funeral.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This has been hanging around in my things for long enough that I have to accept the fact that it's not part of a longer work. So it's here now. Enjoy, I guess.

At the funeral, Kavinsky’s mother wore a veil over her face. She looked perfectly put together behind it, lowered eyes and red-painted lips. Kavinsky’s lips, Ronan thought, uncomfortably. A whole flock of Raven Boys had come to pay their dubious respects, and a handful of students from the local public school: people who had needed a fake ID once, had been to a party once, people with spending money and illicit desires. Some of them knew Kavinsky; some just want to be close to the action.

Jiang and Skov and Swan looked like parallel-universe versions of themselves, clean-cut schoolboys touched by tragedy. It was surreal seeing them in anything but overpriced sneakers and low-slung jeans.

Ronan hadn’t asked Gansey to come with him. He had always kept the parts of himself that were Kavinsky’s away from Gansey. He wore a battered leather jacket over his white tank top; his jeans were torn at the knees and his boots were scuffed. He was the wrong sort of creature, too big for the space, constantly bumping hips and shoulders with all these combed and polished boys.

The priest intoned words that didn’t mean anything to Ronan, but he understood them regardless: Catholic Mass through a looking glass. Behind the altar, stained-glass windows caught the sun and glowed in blue and gold. Ronan pressed his teeth into his lower lip to keep from laughing; Kavinsky had been his own god.

In Ronan’s mind, a vivid cinematic played: The lid of the coffin swung open, knocking the framed photograph on top to the floor. Kavinsky sat up, looking no more hollow-eyed and waxy-skinned than he had before the Fourth of July. He would say something impressively profane - Ronan couldn’t find the right words to put into his zombie Kavinsky’s mouth - swing his legs over the side of the coffin, and -

The scene dissolved into a series of sensory fragments. Glass shattering. The smell of petrol. Smoke in the back of his throat. Ronan pictured the stained-glass window in jewel-coloured shards on the floor.

“He was a great friend to everyone,” someone said, amplified by a tastefully concealed sound system. “Kav - Joseph had such a generous heart.” It was Jiang; his voice was wobbly and uneven.

Ronan stood up. He had no petrol bomb for the stained glass window; for once his mind seemed empty of obscenities to shout. The coffin stayed stubbornly closed; a younger Kavinsky smiled at Ronan from on top. _Wake up, fuckweasel_ , thought Ronan, and in his head the words were in Kavinsky’s voice, dredged up from some hazy half-memory that barely felt like his.

At the lectern Jiang stopped, silent, as Ronan made his way out of his pew. Ronan’s boots on the carpet made a strangely percussive thud, ominous. It echoed off the walls. Some other time Ronan might have enjoyed the sound. The aisle was longer than Ronan remembered, an incense-scented no-man’s land. The walls seemed to lean down on him. He could feel Kavinsky’s eyes boring into his back. _Couldn’t keep up, could you, Lynch?_

He emerged into painful sunlight like stepping into another world, a Narnia trapped in eternal burning summer. A hot wind flung handfuls of stinging dust into his face. Maybe this was what hell felt like. The growl of the BMW’s engine felt faintly sacrilegious somehow, too loud and close and real when everything around him seemed to hold its distance. Inside the church, Kavinsky, ever-restless, had ceased, but Ronan was out here, still going. He drove home at barely a crawl, stubbornly refusing to blink until his eyes stung and his cheeks were wet.

 

That night, Ronan dreamed of Kavinsky.

Ronan dreamed of Kavinsky a lot, or of things that might be Kavinsky, or were a little like Kavinsky, or that were so tangentially reminiscent of Kavinsky that no-one but Ronan himself would recognise them as _dreaming of Kavinsky_ at all.

There were hollows in his cheeks, and the bitter blackness of his eyes seemed to have been concentrated, distilled by Ronan’s memory into pure hungry malevolence. Something about the shadows and angles of his collarbones made Ronan want to dig his fingernails in until he drew blood.

Ronan was driving, or Kavinsky was driving; it was hard to tell. There was a pale, long-fingered hand on the gearstick, and it might’ve belonged to either of them. Outside the window streetlights streaked past, blurring into each other; the reflectors on the roadside extended like a row of bright animal eyes into the distance. Wind troubled the trees, and the road seemed impossibly smooth, almost shining.

As soon as Ronan thought of it, the window was open; he remembered it sliding down, but he knew he’d constructed the memory after the fact. He hung his head out; cold air forced its way between his teeth, stung his eyes to tears. The car was accelerating, blurring Ronan’s vision into a collection of coloured lines.

Ronan was exhilarated, his thoughts silenced by the wind in his ears and the lights in his eyes. He whooped, inaudible over growl of the engine. The headlights gleamed on the road. They were a single bad decision away from spinning out of control.

Ronan’s shoulder slammed into the window frame. The tyres were screaming; somehow, even in the dark Ronan could see thick lines of black rubber across the road as they swerved. “What the fuck, man?” Ronan demanded, or at least he opened his mouth to say the words, but when he turned his head to see Kavinsky, there was no-one in the car but himself, hanging his head out the window while he skidded helplessly into a suburban front yard.

Ronan grabbed the wheel, but when he scrabbled frantically for the brake pedal, his foot found nothing. The scrape of metal on wood sent a vicious shiver down his spine, then shattering glass and splintering plastic. Gravity seemed to change its mind several times, throwing Ronan headfirst into the dashboard, then sideways, before the car slid on its roof across dust and withered grass and came to a silent halt maybe three inches from the corner of the double-wide where Adam had lived with his parents.

 _Sorry, Parrish_ , Ronan thought, in the reverberating silence. _Not even you can fix this one._


End file.
